Auto linking with multiple names

[Jaynay27]

Is there an option, or has anyone figured out, how to have RW recognise variations of title for autolinking to 1 entry?

Not sure if that sentence makes sense, so here is what I mean:

Say I have a character 'John Smith' but my adventure content (FYI RotRL, and no - I haven't come across a 'John Smith' in that adventure, so no spoilers!!!) refers to this character under variations of the subject name.

So I could have
John
Smithy or Big Jim (nic-name?)
Sherriff Smith (job title etc)
etc
etc

As it stands I have been going through each entry and creating custom links in each entry, but as far as I can tell, the custom links only work for each individual topic.

What I would really like is the ability to add all the alternate versions of the entry name, to the main entry, so that I can just re-scan the links, rather than create custom links all the time.

I hope this makes sense

Thankyou all.

[Leonal]

You should be able to do this by adding one or more aliases to the entry I believe.

Use CTRL+M or click the hammer&wrench icon next to the name entry and select "Manage Aliases...".

[zarlor]

Yep, judicious use of Aliases is exactly how I handle it in the stuff I've been working on. Ty in include all the ways you might reference them for autolinking purposes,too. So name, just surname, title, pretty much variations like you've shown above. For objects or creatures I also make sure to list bot the singular and plural of the name as well. So I might have entries for both "ghoul" and "ghouls"

I will note that in some cases it can get a bit... annoying, with certain names. One of the things I'm working on has the surname Long as an alias and there is an Edge called Hard. Suffice to say that those two words show up all over the place in the general text so I'm constantly telling the autolink to ignore them! So I'd almost suggest, if possible, not to name stuff with things that are common words like that if you can avoid it.

[DeckOfManyThings]

Yeah, for my Edge of the Empire campaign, I was having the problem of the "empire" in "criminal empire" linking back to the Imperial one because it was an alias.

I remedied this by creating a topic called "criminal empire" specifically so I wouldn't get erroneous links.

[zarlor]

Oh yes, good point. Where possible it might be OK to have short names (or it may even be needed as the primary name of something) but if you have a longer alias that something might be referred to as I would definitely include that. For example I may have Someone names John Sheriff and then I man have George Smith, who is the Sheriff of the town. So while I may have an alias for John of just "Sheriff" for George I would make sure I have an alias of "the Sheriff". Autolinking seems to try and find the longest name/alias for something before going to the smaller names so it will offer a link to "the Sheriff" before it offers a link to just "Sheriff". So I find that really helpful.

[Jaynay27]

Cheers guys.
Exactly what I was long for, but couldn't find after 8 hours of data entry.
Still, chapter 1 of RotRL is pretty much complete